Taking up the slack

Nassau County’s budget problems have affected all its departments, including its police department, which has recently made reassignments and cut backs. And while Rockville Centre has its own police department, county cuts are having a serious impact on the village force.

All county residents pay a county “police headquarters tax,” whether or not they live in a village with its own department. The tax covers county detective work, training, aviation and marine units and other services the county police provide. Cutbacks have reduced the availability of these services, requiring village police departments, including Rockville Centre’s, to pick up the slack at village residents’ expense.

“Where we’ve seen the cut is in training and detective services. That’s what affected the village the most,” said RVCPD Commissioner Charles Gennario. “If I need something addressed, I need to wait for [the county detectives] to get to it if it’s a priority for them, or I have to put my detectives on it. And my detectives do mostly narcotics. But they also address the things I need them to.”

The problems are caused, Gennario said, not by the county police department itself, but by the cutbacks in funding and manpower from the county government. “I can call the Nassau County chief up, and he’ll give me everything he can,” Gennario said. “It’s that they don’t have the assets to run the county department the way it should be run.”

Last year, Rockville Centre residents paid about $6.9 million in county police headquarters taxes.

“We’re funding the whole First Precinct, the way I look at it,” said Rockville Centre Mayor Francis X. Murray. About three years ago, Murray held a meeting with the leaders of the police department to ask them to rescind the headquarters tax and just have the village pay for the NCPD services it uses. “What I said at the meeting was, give us back the $8 million, and when we need a helicopter or extra police, we’ll pay it,” Murray said.

“It’s just the way the system is,” he later added. “And it needs to be changed, but it never will.”

Gennario said that the RVCPD referred about 350 cases to the county last year. The county did not pursue all of them, so some had to be investigated by Rockville Centre detectives.

“[The NCPD does] triage — wherever the most important thing is, that’s where they send their resources,” he said.

County detectives’ assistance has been critical in recent cases, Gennario said, like the Roxen Road assault and the murder of Lauren Daverin-Gresham last summer. But for smaller cases, like burglaries, the county doesn’t have the same response.

The problem with having RVCPD detectives pick up more cases is that their salaries come from the village police department’s $10.3 million budget.

Besides the lack of detective assistance, county cutbacks are also affecting the training that the NCPD is supposed to provide local departments.

“Training is pretty much nonexistent in Nassau County,” Gennario said, adding that it was a complaint he has heard from the heads of many other local police departments. “They’re supposed to provide training for all the departments in the county. If they don’t, I have to do it. The last three hires I had, we sent them to the [police] academy in Westchester.”

Like many other professions, police officers must routinely take training classes to make sure they are always up to date on the latest information, methods and techniques. The training covers things like firearms recertification, how police officers should handle certain situations and new techniques or systems that may arise.

“We do a lot of training, but these are things that the Nassau County police are supposed to provide by charter, but they don’t,” Gennario said. “So it means I have to have a full-time training officer.”

Unrelated to budgetary issues, the county is also holding up Gennario’s ability to hire new police officers. The county provides Civil Service lists to local departments (with the exception of Nassau’s cities, Long Beach and Glen Cove) that they can hire new officers from. But the last time the county released a list was in December, and all of the names on it are frozen. Right now, Gennario said the RVCPD has five open positions he’s looking to fill.

Gennario said he’s expecting a new list soon, but doesn’t know when. Even if he were to get it this week, he wouldn’t be able to put the new officers on the streets until January or February because of the length of time it takes to hire and train them.

“Nassau County has a [police academy] class in now,” said Gennario. “I need people, but I couldn’t get them into that class. So now when I hire, if Nassau County isn’t holding a class, I’m going to have to find an academy for them to go to.”